Unincorporated

When something like this happens, it’s easy to feel like a child. In such an event, the students become the grownups, since they know the awful details long before it hits the news. Teachers who taught the boy have some small contribution to the conversation and drop his photo into the faculty group text and say that he was a “joy” and a “light.” For the rest of us who never knew him, we offer comfort where we can, but we have little to say beyond what is obvious.

His picture made me think about a former student of mine. Another “light.” He left before his senior year to go to boarding school, and I gave him a hard time about it. He made all this progress in my class, wrote some decent papers, scored a 4 on the AP exam, and then left us for Piney Woods, this 2000-acre agricultural school about twenty miles south of Jackson, an oblivion somewhere between the towns of Star and Braxton. Piney Woods doesn’t even belong to a town. It’s just Piney Woods. Unincorporated.

It was founded in the early 1900s as a school for the descendants of slaves. And in the one hundred-something years since then, no one has had any interest in giving the school’s pine trees any better adjective than “piney.” I found the name lazy until it occurred to me that “pine” might have a double meaning. A friend of mine who taught there recalled a student who tried to run away. It was all doomed from the beginning, when his parents told him he was going to Disney World. Now every time I pass the school on my drive down to the Gulf Coast and see the brown grass and terracotta-colored roofs, I wonder when the kid must’ve grown suspicious, and also how unfamiliar you’d have to be with the Magic Kingdom to turn off a crumbling highway and weave through cow pasture and still hold out. Still think, “Ok. Ok. Maybe the rollercoasters are in the back. Through the piney trees.”

When I asked my student why he wanted to go to a place that other young people were apparently trying to escape, he told me that he believed Piney Woods was his ticket into an HBCU. I said his current school was also a legitimate “ticket.” I didn’t tell him about the pining, the dream world that would surely dissipate, late or soon. I really thought he’d come back after a few months. But he didn’t. He chose obscurity on the prairie for his senior year. When he recently emailed me to say that he was accepted into Howard, he included a sincere thank-you. For who knows what. The only help I might’ve offered him was the tension or friction or whatever form of resistance it takes to turn potential energy into kinetic.

The photo circulating among the faculty and also now on the news shows another young man who had that same potential. That is the tragedy of it. I’ve spent so much time defending Jackson, MS, as a place capable of progress and growth that I forget that many of our young men live on a precipice. I don’t know if my student perceived this—if, in considering his horizons, he realized that the flat lands offer an unobstructed view. I just know that when I learned of the death of a young man I never really knew, I thought of a young man I did know, and I imagined him tucked away like a rare coin, where no one would think to look.